Duncan Gotobed

It's all about participation

Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO talks about the importance of participation on the Nokia Ideas project site.

His message is just as relevant to learning and development as it is to service.

What would you like?

Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking and Outliers: The Story of Success argues that people don't know what they want.

In this TED talk Malcolm shares what can be learnt from creating spaghetti sauce.  

He argues that asking people what they want doesn't work because people don't know.

Gladwell explains that the way Prego developed an insight into spaghetti sauce came from developing and testing a set of prototype tomato sauces, which varied in every conceivable way. The data was then clustered and three main types of  sauce were identified: plain, spicey and chunky. Prego discovered that a third of Americans 'craved' extra chunky sauce and reformulated its products accordingly.

It's easy to ask a customer "what would you like?" It's harder and more rewarding to help them to articulate their deep seated preferences.

Designing the Customer Service Experience

The Design Council has produced an interesting case study which shows the benefits of applying design principles to public services. It's not just about efficiency and effectiveness but also usability, usefulness and desireability.

In a related post, Marc Fonteijn extends the idea of customer service design by talking about the following service elements:

• off stage, describes how customers interact with each other i.e. having a pleasant conversation with each other while queuing or having to put up with someone's loud Ipod on a bus
• front stage, where the actual service interaction take place 
• back stage involves the logistics of delivering the service 

He argues that organisations need to focus on not only the key interactions between their customer and themselves but also the time berween those 'touch points'.

Within the context of a learnng programme, delivered over a period of time, it's worth giving some thouhgt as to how to shape people's learning experience between modules.

Read the blog post here.  

Picture: happy customer.. by 'smil

Understand Your Customers

Peter Merholz shares some great ideas on how to understand your customers better:

 

Forget surveys, focus groups, phone questionnaires - they don't come up with anything conclusive

Go to your customers and encourage them to talk to you. Find out how they get things done. Pay attention to their environment as well as the tools and language they use.

Record everything you can. Take notes and video the session. Photograph anything of interest.

Then take the information you gathered and create 'Personas', which are fictional characters that convey the breadth of what you experienced. It helps other people involved in the design work to pull out the key points of the research.

Read the article.